A weeklong, round-the-clock search for victims of a landslide that may have buried dozens of miners in Indonesia is still underway, a rescue official said Tuesday, as the confirmed death toll rose to 17.

The landslide, which struck on Feb. 26 on the island of Sulawesi, left an unknown number of miners trapped underground in makeshift holes. As of Tuesday, rescue personnel combing the steep jungle terrain with earth movers had found 18 survivors, and the death toll had risen from nine a day earlier.

"We have no exact number of the people down there, or even how many small holes there are," Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for Indonesia's search and rescue agency, said by telephone.

He added that in addition to 17 dead, the authorities had found body parts that they were working to identify.

They were also searching for the owners of about 50 motorcycles that have been parked near the mining site for days, he said.

Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesman for Indonesia's disaster management agency, told reporters in a WhatsApp message on Monday that local estimates of the number of miners working at the site ranged from about 30 to 100.

Mr. Sutopo said pinpointing the number of miners buried by the landslide had been difficult partly because some might have been trapped in smaller offshoots of the site's primary mining pit.

© Antara Foto/Reuters
Rescue workers carrying a body bag containing a victim of the landslide at an illegal gold mine in Indonesia last week.

Death toll from a landslide in a smallholder mining site in Bakan Village, Bolaang Mongondow District, North Sulawesi Province, rose to 27 as of Wednesday morning.

The joint Search and Rescue (SAR) team found another body on Wednesday at 8:18 a.m. local time and sent it to Kotamobagu Hospital for identification.

Tens of gold miners were buried as a mining site collapsed in Bakan Village on February 27, 2019. Eighteen miners survived the disaster.

"Tens of gold miners are buried by a landslide in an illegal gold mining site on February 27, 2019, at 9 p.m. local time," Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman of the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB), noted on his Twitter account, last Wednesday.

Deputy for Operation, Search, and Help of the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) Nugroho Budi Wiryanto had earlier remarked that the SAR team will continue to evacuate those still trapped in the mining site.

"We will continue to evacuate them using heavy duty equipment," he noted.

Wiryanto said he was unaware of the exact number of people still trapped in the mining site.

© ANTARA PHOTO/Adwit B Pramono
Death toll from landslide rose to 27